High-tech images of the lungs of people with “latent” tuberculosis (TB) identified those at risk of developing symptoms. The new work, which researchers presented in a special TB session at the 21st International AIDS Conference held in Durban, South Africa last week, suggests new ways to evaluate whether treatment has cured an infection. But it could also upend the conventional wisdom that billions of people are walking around with dormant TB in their lungs that could one day erupt in full-fledged disease.

As the International AIDS Conference kicked off in Durban, South Africa, today, two of the nation’s most prominent biomedical research institutions announced that they will marry and combine resources to attack the raging coepidemic of tuberculosis (TB) and HIV in the region. 

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug, bedaquiline, for only patients who have multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, which can require up to 2 years of treatment. It is the first new tuberculosis drug to be green-lighted in more than 40 years, but the celebration was tempered as sobering challenges face the drug's wide scale use.

Nearly 1.5 million people die from tuberculosis every year, even though most cases can be cured with routine antibiotic treatments. One country’s fight to get the ancient scourge under control has an unlikely hero: a simple diagnostic test.